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REPOST: "Logic and Mr. Luhmann" (2007)
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Jeff Rubard
Nov 23, 2021, 6:56:22 PM11/23/21
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From an old blog of mine.
Logic and Mr. Luhmann
June 20th, 2007
Well, I complained about the lack of sociological material on the Web, so I might as well do my bit by saying something about Niklas Luhmann’s use of logical concepts.
Luhmann was a contemporary of Jürgen Habermas, a youth during the second World War: after the war, he took a law degree and worked in the civil service of Lower Saxony. In the 1960s, Luhmann made a career change, studying for a year with Talcott Parsons at Harvard and later being appointed to the faculty of the new University of Bielefeld (his writings having been accepted as qualifications in lieu of a proper credential). From that point on, he was perhaps the most influential sociologist in the Bundesrepublik, eclipsing his disputant Habermas (co-author with Luhmann of a book Systems Theory: Social Technology or Theory of Society? — Habermas taking the former position and Luhmann the latter) . But although Luhmann’s ideas were a common currency among large sectors of the educated German public, his domestic popularity never translated into overseas notoriety: in the US, Luhmann’s work is the exclusive property of “theorists” in specific social-scientific and humanistic fields, not for the most part a subject of serious or widespread sociological attention.
There are reasons for this. A lot of people are put off by Habermas’ syncretism, his blending of a hundred and one approaches from seemingly widely disparate areas of inquiry: it’s too much to ask that someone be able to apply speech-act theory to the theory of social differentiation, they think. Although he was a little more selective in his reference points, Luhmann’s writing style is even more off-putting; he explicitly stated an aim of making his works difficult to read, such that they might not be comfortably read and misunderstood. But Luhmann’s attempts at a more “technical” sociology through the use of formal methods have been questionable (and although this is a common enough complaint in the “soft” sciences, Anglophone interest in Luhmann has not been great enough to generate or propagate such criticisms).
Luhmann published many books, but his mature theory can be found laid out in two of them: Social Systems, a metatheoretical introduction to the methods of analysis Luhmann proposed to apply to social phenomena, and Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, published a year before Luhmann’s death in 1998. This second book is one in a series of books titled “______ der Gesellschaft“, which constitute a Realphilosophie of sorts, applying systems-theoretic methods to various aspects of society. The most general of social systems being society as a whole, the two-volume “Society of Society” explains how “second-order cybernetic” mechanisms for the ability of a social system to remain stable, act, and evolve are actually reflected in contemporary world society.
Since “first-order” cybernetics was quite the fad in early postwar social science, one quite thoroughly done with, there might be an expectation that a “second-order” variant incorporating the ability of systems to observe themselves, generalizing Kant’s famous transcendental unity of apperception to systems other than individual minds, would prove problematic. And indeed, one of Luhmann’s most-cited authors in Social Systems is the much-maligned George Spencer-Brown, whose Laws of Form has been described on the Internet as “just for laughs” and demonstrated in print to contain an idiosyncratic notation for the propositional calculus in its talk of “drawing a distinction”. But the enterprising reader of social theory could put all that together for themselves: what I would like to comment on is Luhmann’s use of logic in his untranslated “magnum opus“, since I have been working through it a little bit at a time (I’ve had the Suhrkamp paperbacks for a couple years, but they collected dust awaiting a passable facility with reading German on my part).
One might think that the “concrete” character of Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft would make for easier going in this respect, since Social Systems attempted to lay down rules all systems operating with meaning must follow; and this is partially true, since Luhmann is not forced to say anything implausible or falsifiable about “psychic systems” to make his points. Unfortunately, Luhmann seems to have graduated to a more common sort of error in operating with formal concepts, making “philosophical” points out of formal results — the oft-decried “Gödelization” of meaning is in full effect in several passages. But what is perhaps even less fortunate is the lack of attention to concepts that are rightfully connected to formal systems: Luhmann borrows a colleagues’ description of some social systems as “autological”, with nary a mention of the origin of this term in Grelling’s paradox.
Luhmann’s argumentation concerning the structure of society is (by the standards of sociology) quite rigorous, raising the question whether significant logical savvy is really a precondition for “exact” work in the human sciences. But I think it is still unfortunate that Luhmann’s systematic works are not echt logical, since his theory of “society without people” would have provided a nice counterpoint to the heavily “humanist” tilt of most formal reasoning.
Logic and Mr. Luhmann
June 20th, 2007
Well, I complained about the lack of sociological material on the Web, so I might as well do my bit by saying something about Niklas Luhmann’s use of logical concepts.
Luhmann was a contemporary of Jürgen Habermas, a youth during the second World War: after the war, he took a law degree and worked in the civil service of Lower Saxony. In the 1960s, Luhmann made a career change, studying for a year with Talcott Parsons at Harvard and later being appointed to the faculty of the new University of Bielefeld (his writings having been accepted as qualifications in lieu of a proper credential). From that point on, he was perhaps the most influential sociologist in the Bundesrepublik, eclipsing his disputant Habermas (co-author with Luhmann of a book Systems Theory: Social Technology or Theory of Society? — Habermas taking the former position and Luhmann the latter) . But although Luhmann’s ideas were a common currency among large sectors of the educated German public, his domestic popularity never translated into overseas notoriety: in the US, Luhmann’s work is the exclusive property of “theorists” in specific social-scientific and humanistic fields, not for the most part a subject of serious or widespread sociological attention.
There are reasons for this. A lot of people are put off by Habermas’ syncretism, his blending of a hundred and one approaches from seemingly widely disparate areas of inquiry: it’s too much to ask that someone be able to apply speech-act theory to the theory of social differentiation, they think. Although he was a little more selective in his reference points, Luhmann’s writing style is even more off-putting; he explicitly stated an aim of making his works difficult to read, such that they might not be comfortably read and misunderstood. But Luhmann’s attempts at a more “technical” sociology through the use of formal methods have been questionable (and although this is a common enough complaint in the “soft” sciences, Anglophone interest in Luhmann has not been great enough to generate or propagate such criticisms).
Luhmann published many books, but his mature theory can be found laid out in two of them: Social Systems, a metatheoretical introduction to the methods of analysis Luhmann proposed to apply to social phenomena, and Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, published a year before Luhmann’s death in 1998. This second book is one in a series of books titled “______ der Gesellschaft“, which constitute a Realphilosophie of sorts, applying systems-theoretic methods to various aspects of society. The most general of social systems being society as a whole, the two-volume “Society of Society” explains how “second-order cybernetic” mechanisms for the ability of a social system to remain stable, act, and evolve are actually reflected in contemporary world society.
Since “first-order” cybernetics was quite the fad in early postwar social science, one quite thoroughly done with, there might be an expectation that a “second-order” variant incorporating the ability of systems to observe themselves, generalizing Kant’s famous transcendental unity of apperception to systems other than individual minds, would prove problematic. And indeed, one of Luhmann’s most-cited authors in Social Systems is the much-maligned George Spencer-Brown, whose Laws of Form has been described on the Internet as “just for laughs” and demonstrated in print to contain an idiosyncratic notation for the propositional calculus in its talk of “drawing a distinction”. But the enterprising reader of social theory could put all that together for themselves: what I would like to comment on is Luhmann’s use of logic in his untranslated “magnum opus“, since I have been working through it a little bit at a time (I’ve had the Suhrkamp paperbacks for a couple years, but they collected dust awaiting a passable facility with reading German on my part).
One might think that the “concrete” character of Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft would make for easier going in this respect, since Social Systems attempted to lay down rules all systems operating with meaning must follow; and this is partially true, since Luhmann is not forced to say anything implausible or falsifiable about “psychic systems” to make his points. Unfortunately, Luhmann seems to have graduated to a more common sort of error in operating with formal concepts, making “philosophical” points out of formal results — the oft-decried “Gödelization” of meaning is in full effect in several passages. But what is perhaps even less fortunate is the lack of attention to concepts that are rightfully connected to formal systems: Luhmann borrows a colleagues’ description of some social systems as “autological”, with nary a mention of the origin of this term in Grelling’s paradox.
Luhmann’s argumentation concerning the structure of society is (by the standards of sociology) quite rigorous, raising the question whether significant logical savvy is really a precondition for “exact” work in the human sciences. But I think it is still unfortunate that Luhmann’s systematic works are not echt logical, since his theory of “society without people” would have provided a nice counterpoint to the heavily “humanist” tilt of most formal reasoning.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 31, 2022, 7:46:41 PM1/31/22
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